Brown’s Budget Shuffle: Something From Nothing is Still Nothing

"Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice"—Gov. Jerry Brown, California (quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle)

Gov. Brown is correct—funding poor schools the same as affluent schools is not only unjust, it is pedagogically irrational.  Poor children have greater educational needs, while their parents have far less to donate to school fundraisers. Funding them equally only guarantees unequal outcomes. Yet his solution—reallocating revenues from wealthier schools to poorer school—is neither just nor rational.

None of California’s schools currently receives adequate funding. The state has slashed over $20 billion from K-12 education over the past five years and none of this will be restored under the state’s new “millionaire’s” tax. Furthermore, basic aid school districts (the so-called affluent districts that receive only the “basic” aid from the state because they have higher than average property tax bases) have already lost 90% of the funding they once received from the state. Therefore, taking away scarce resources from these schools only serves to make them more like the state’s low income schools.

While it is true that affluent schools have fewer needs than lower income schools, they were not receiving sufficient funding from the state or local property taxes even before the economic meltdown and draconian budget cuts that followed. Consequently, they have relied on fundraising to make up some of the difference, something they can do with greater ease and success than lower income schools, since the parents tend to be wealthier and have more disposable income. Yet even this hasn’t prevented basic aid schools from losing counselors, librarians and nurses; increasing class sizes to 35 students per teacher (or higher); imposing out-of-pocket fees on teachers for health insurance; and freezing or cutting wages. Furthermore, even within basic aid districts there are often low income schools with student demographics similar to poor, inner city schools. Reducing their funding because they happen to be in an “affluent” basic aid district would end up harming the lower income students Brown’s plan is intended to help.

Of course it is important to provide low income schools with additional funding, over and above what the affluent ones receive, because of their greater needs. However, this must be accomplished through increased tax revenues, not by ripping off other schools. Yet increased school funding, alone, will not solve the myriad ways in which poverty impacts educational outcomes. To really close the achievement gap, poor kids in poor schools need relief from their poverty so they aren’t coming to school hungry and suffering from stress and untreated medical conditions. Their parents need relief from poverty before they even have children, since poverty increases the chances children will be born premature, with low birth weight, and suffer from stress, malnutrition and environmental toxins, each of which contribute to cognitive impairment and learning disabilities.

Short of this, low income schools need large infusions of cash—far more than they would receive under the Brown plan. They need enough revenue to lower class sizes and hire extra teachers and reading specialists. Low income schools need full-time nurses or on-site clinics to care for uninsured children and reduce the amount of class time lost to treatable and preventable illnesses. Low income schools need staff and resources to provide adult education and English language support for parents. They need extra funding for after school programs so that children aren’t watching television or getting into trouble or hurt when classes end. They need mental health specialists to help students suffering from stress, anxiety and other common mental health problems that often go undiagnosed or treated in poor children.

If the schools truly are public, then parents should not have to pay more out of pocket for fundraisers and benefits, in addition to what they contribute through their taxes. If they were adequately funded, there would be much less need for this.

This is another major problem with school finance. Affluent families are affluent, in part, because they can shelter much of their income from taxation (e.g., deductions and write-offs) and many do not want to pay a penny for the education of other people’s children. By maintaining tax rates at their current levels (which are far lower than they were during the Reagan era and earlier), the affluent can continue amass great quantities of wealth, while getting an excellent free education for their children at the exclusive public schools in their wealthy enclaves. They can then supplement their schools’ mediocre budgets with tax deductible donations that further lower their tax liabilities, while increasing the education quality gap to the benefit of their own children. Thus, they (and their legislators) are unlikely to accept Brown’s proposal (or the tax increases necessary to put a serious dent in the problem).

Education Dollars at Work: The DOE’s Private Arsenal

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, there has been considerable talk about how to make our schools safer, including the NRA’s proposal to put armed guards in every school. However, this is not why the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) Office of Inspector General bought 27 new Remington Model 870 police 12-gauge shotguns in 2010. Nor were these weapons purchased to improve graduation rates or close the achievement gap. Rather, these guns were obtained for the benefit of DOE’s secret identity as an elite education fraud fighting unit.

According to Valerie Strauss, the guns were purchased to replace their old guns, weapons they argue are necessary for their “high-risk” crime fighting duties. Strauss’ piece in the Washington Post quoted a DOE spokesperson who said the Office of Inspector General arrests people with criminal backgrounds, including some with “histories of murder or violence toward law enforcement officers,” and has “full statutory law enforcement authority.”

The one example that Strauss gave of such an investigation was a recent search of a Stockton, California home as part of an investigation of waste and fraud involving federal education funds.

It seems to me that if being robbed and embezzled by highly armed, violent insiders is pervasive enough to warrant having its own heavily armed police force, the DOE has been wasting taxpayers’ money with NCLB, Race to the Top, and all its other expensive “reforms.” Instead, they should be implementing sting operations in every district in the country, creating departments of internal affairs, hiring undercover agents and turning teachers into Serpicos to root out all this corruption and vice, and then using the billions of dollars recovered by these operations to buy schools more books, computers, support staff, librarians, nurses, counselors and decently paid teachers.

More Nurses and Improved Educational Outcomes

(Image from Flickr, from Elgin County Archives)

The single biggest influence on students’ educational achievement is their socioeconomic backgrounds. While good teachers can help some students overcome the challenges they face and they can make the curriculum more exciting and engaging for the majority of their students, they cannot make all students succeed academically.

There are numerous reasons why lower income children do more poorly in school than their affluent peers. Lower income parents tend to read less to their young children and use less complex vocabulary, for example, which contributes to an academic achievement gap even before children have entered kindergarten. Lower income parents are less able to provide enriching extracurricular activities on weekends and during the summer, like camp, summer school, arts and music classes, and travel. They are less able to hire tutors or purchase supplemental learning materials. Many are working so hard to put food on their children’s table, often at multiple jobs, or at night, that they simply aren’t available to assist with homework or meet with teachers.

Poor children also have a higher rate of health conditions that can undermine their academic success. For example, they are more likely to be born prematurely or with low birth weight and to suffer from malnutrition or anemia, any one of which can lead to cognitive impairment or learning disabilities. They are also more likely to be homeless or suffer housing insecurity and have untreated chronic diseases or excessive absences, any one of which can undermine stability and consistency of educational programs and social relationships. They are more likely to suffer stress from financial uncertainty at home or from the violence in their neighborhoods, which can lead to overproduction of the stress hormone cortisol, which can impair memory and cognitive function. They are also more like to be exposed to excessive levels of cortisol in utero, which can affect their physical health and cognitive development.

While ending poverty and closing the wealth gap might seem intractable, many of the problems associated with poverty that threaten children’s ability to succeed academically can be significantly reduced by placing health clinics staffed by qualified registered nurses in every school.

As many as 18% of school children have chronic health conditions, according to the Wall Street Journal, including attention disorders, diabetes, epilepsy and asthma. 33% of students are now obese or overweight and many of them have specialized physical and mental health problems associated with their weight.

Nurses can treat mild injuries and disease symptoms, as well as administer medications to chronically ill students, thus helping to keep more students in class. They can help screen for vision and hearing problems, thus improving children’s ability to access academic lessons and resources. They can do health outreach to help reduce obesity, smoking, sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies and to reduce transmission of infectious diseases, all of which should also serve to keep more children in school.

Sadly, the trend over the past two decades has been just the opposite. According to the National Association of School Nurses, only 45% of public schools currently have fulltime nurses, while 25% of schools have no nurses at all. The state of Michigan has only one nurse for every 4,411 students. Vermont, in contrast, has one nurse for every 396 students.

In addition to eliminating nurses entirely, many districts are replacing registered nurses with licensed practical nurses and vocational nurses, who are less expensive, but also less qualified. Linda Davis-Alldritt, president of the school nurses association, said this is like replacing credentialed teachers with teacher’s aids, according to the WSJ.

The number of children needing medical attention at school is not trivial. The National Association of School Nurses says that 24% of American school age children have vision deficiencies, 13% are on prescription drugs, 6% are out more than 11 school days due to injury or illness, 10% have asthma, 5% have seizure disorders, 5% have food allergies, 5% have hearing deficiencies and 5% have ADHD.

Many of these children come to school, but cannot concentrate or focus for extended periods because of pain or discomfort. Many don’t come to school at all because they are too sick or uncomfortable.

There is also a strong connection between absences and academic success. In a study of Baltimore school children, high school drop-outs averaged 27.6 absences per year, while graduates averaged only 11.8. Therefore, anything that can be done to reduce infections and alleviate symptoms, such as increasing health services at schools, should help increase the amount of time kids spend in class and improve their chances of graduating on time.

Big Surprise: Schools Hiring Fewer Nurses, Librarians

According to recent findings released last week by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), California is issuing fewer credentials for K-12 service positions like librarians, school nurses and administrators, and schools are hiring fewer service staff.

Between the 2006-07 and 2010-11 school years, CTC issued 11% fewer service credentials, while the number of people working in service positions dropped by 9%. The biggest decline was for nurse credentials—a 26.4% drop, while the number of nurses working in the public schools went down by 13.3%. The number of school social worker credentials fell by 18.9% and 10% for school psychologists.

There was an 8.3% increase in new teacher librarian credentials in 2010-11. However, the number of librarians working in the schools fell from 1,234 in 2006-7 to 895 in 2010-11, a 27% drop. There was also an increase in speech pathologist credentials and the number of speech pathologists working in schools declined.

(To read more, see the Bay Citizen)

CA Teachers to Inject Students Rectally

Teacher's new tool (image by Zaldyimg)

SB 161 (Huff), a bill that allows non-medical personnel to administer Diastat rectally to students having epileptic seizures, has passed the California Senate and is now in the Assembly. It also has the support of the Obama administration.

On first glance, the legislation is so absurd it sounds like a sick joke. Teachers will pull down a student’s pants in front of classmates and jab a syringe into his or her ass? In any other circumstance, we’d call such behavior molestation or abuse or practicing medicine without a license.

Here are the problems. All students are allowed equal access to educational services, regardless of disability, including epileptics and diabetics (the legislature also wants teachers to inject diabetic students, just not necessary in their rectums). Diabetics and epileptics sometimes have seizures in class, during which they are unable to inject themselves. Thus, there is a need for someone to be on hand to provide this potentially life-saving service. The only people at schools trained to do this safely, legally and with dignity are nurses, but we have stripped away so much funding from public education that schools can no longer afford full-time nurses. Many schools do not have nurses at all.

The solution, however, is not to put sharp, potentially dangerous needles (or plastic syringes without needles, in the case of diastat) into the hands of untrained non-medical personnel, who are at the same time responsible for the safety and learning of 20-35 other children. It is madness and stupidity, conceivable only because teachers are already so beaten down professionally and their unions so weak that politicians believe they can continue to defund schools and simply pile more and more work onto the teachers, regardless of how dangerous, irresponsible or stupid it is to do so.

Furthermore, ALL students, even those without disabilities, should have access to licensed and appropriately trained medical staff to ensure proper care. Legislation like SB 161 legitimizes and normalizes a world without school nurses, thus placing all students at risk of complications or death from illnesses and injuries that a trained school nurse would normally identify, treat or refer to a doctor. School nurses also have the potential to increase the amount of time students are in class by helping low income students manage minor injuries, disease, hunger or malnutrition that might otherwise keep them home or escalate into an emergency room visit.

Giving injections is not a trivial matter. There are obvious risks, like the spread of HIV and other blood-borne diseases, either through poor training or carelessness, or because teachers may be distracted by their other students, running round, screaming, rough housing or having their own medical emergency. However, the administration of Diastat (which does not use a needle) requires that the provider correctly identify the type of seizure the student is having, administer the drug properly in the rectum and at the correct dosage. It is only used for “cluster” seizures, yet there are many types of seizures, and distinguishing between them is no easy task, especially for a teacher who may never have seen a seizure before and who is likely scared.  If done incorrectly, the injection could cause death from respiratory failure. Furthermore, SB 161 does not provide funding to train teachers, nor does it provide liability protection.

Recommendations by the CTA for its Members and Supporters

• Contact your lawmaker using CTA’s Legislative Action Center.
• Read CTA's official letter of opposition to SB 161.
• Read the opposition letter from the California School Nurses Association.

Recommendations by Modern School for the CTA

• Stop wasting so much time and money buying politicians
• Stop running scared and making compromises with abusive politicians in the desperate hope that the abuse will end (it doesn’t in domestic abuse, why should we believe it would here?)
• Start investing the majority of union resources on organizing members and educating the public
• Prepare for a wave of strike actions, including a general strike, not just to oppose SB 161, but all the attacks on the teaching profession (e.g., pension reform, ending seniority, weakening tenure, increasing class sizes, testing, charter schools) AND for massively increased funding so all schools are adequately staffed with nurses, librarians, counselors and support staff